Revista de Derecho Político (Dec 2018)
The Recall in Colombia: institutional design and results of its application
Abstract
Abstract: Since the 90s, after the crisis of the mass representation model characteristic of the Welfare States, and the arrival of the so-called audience democracy, typical of the States of the Global Era, several Latin American countries undertook constitutional reforms in which, among other changes, incorporated citizen participation and control mechanisms associated with participatory and direct conceptions of democracy, such as: the popular initiative, the popular consultation, the participatory budget and the recall, among others. This last tool of vertical societal accountability allows the citizens to dismiss the representatives elected by them through the vote in a referendum, which is called after their promoters have managed to gather the minimum number of signatures required to carry out the initiative. Colombia incorporated it in its 1991 Constitution, but only to dismiss governors and mayors. That is, executive authorities at the subnational level, thus excluding the president and legislators at all levels. In 1994 two laws regulated its exercise: law number 131 and 134. In the years 2002 and 2015, modifications were approved tending to diminish its requirements: law number 741 and 1.757, respectively. However, having submitted numerous applications in its more than 20 years of validity, no ruler was revoked until now. This article focuses on analyzing, first, the institutional design of the recall in Colombia, to determine if it has tended to facilitate or hinder its use by the population. In the same sense, the successive modifications carried out through the aforementioned laws were studied, which were aimed at reducing key requirements such as: the number of signatures needed to accompany the request, the minimum participation required in the referendum to validate the vote, the number of votes needed to dismiss the president, among others. Likewise, the empirical performance of this tool is studied during the period 1997-2015. The results obtained indicate that, despite the regulatory reforms that progressively reduced their implementation requirements, and having submitted numerous requests, no agent was revoked. Among its causes is identified the political incentive that the replacement of the revoked rulers via elections implies for its opponents interested in arriving in advance to power. However, the electoral political use of this mechanism, at the hands of former and future candidates for office, has not been accompanied at the polls with sufficient popular support to reach the minimum adhesions required for the revocation. In this way, the recall in Colombia would work less as a mechanism of citizen control than as an instrument of intra-elite political dispute.
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